Saved In Translation: Helping The Message Survive The Medium In Iraq

Speak And Spell (And Understand) The Endurance PC, custom built for rapid translation programs, is small, light and built to milspec.

NEW YORK—Sometimes it's hard enough to explain yourself in English. Once you cross the border, navigating a foreign language—fraught with idiomatic expressions and obscure but critical aberrations of grammar—can mangle a simple statement beyond recognition. Indeed, as President John F. Kennedy told a crowd of West Berliners, "I am a jelly doughnut."

Minnesota based software company SpeechGear wants to make it easier to communicate in any language, with their innovative suite of real-time translation programs that instantly interpret entire phrases accurately and efficiently. And they're proving their technology in one of the most meaning-critical forums in the world: Interactions between English and Arabic speakers in the war in Iraq.

We had a brief conversation with Compadre, SpeechGear's software, which was loaded onto a custom built, rugedized tablet PC—called Endurance, and also sold by the company—that was on display during Fleet Week on board the USS Kearsarge. Compadre has a lot to say, literally and figuratively. Instead of keying in words, a slow and error-prone process, users speak into a microphone. The program interprets the speech and plays the translated phrase out loud. The process is quick enough to enable rapid-fire exchanges—something that has long hampered humanitarian and diplomatic efforts in the Middle East. "Two people who speak different languages," said SpeechGear business development manager Sean Lanahan, "can have a conversation that's as fluid as the one we're having right now."

Compadre has a finely tuned ear for dialects, but it works best after a five-minute, voice-learning initialization, according to Lanahan, and recognition improves with use. (However, he added, it will accurately understand most speech without that learning period. "It would be pretty awkward and time consuming if every Iraqi had to spend five minutes teaching the program to understand him," he said. "So Compadre works almost as well without the introduction.")

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Lanahan's demonstration of the program highlighted that efficiency. "Hello, I am a member of the coalition forces," he said into a microphone connected to the Endurance PC. Compadre's surprisingly human-like voice repeated the phrase, with the added flair of what is, according to Lanahan, an authentic Iraqi dialect.

More importantly, the system is able to understand the minutia of a foreign language, where one word will serve several meanings depending on the context. This is where most translation programs fail: When the message is in the medium, the true meaning behind a phrase is easily lost in translation. AltaVista's Babelfish translates the French idiomatic expression dis-donc (which actually means, roughly, "let's say," as in, "let's say I were to try to translate this") into the literal, awkward and confusing "say-therefore." It's no jelly doughnut, but it would still raise a few French eyebrows—and that's an example of a relatively easy-to-translate Romance language. Now imagine using a computer to translate complicated Semitic vernacular during a shooting war.

Case in point: The Arabic word atalaq means, in a general sense, "to free," or "release" (as in prisoners, or a divorce). But in a military context, the word takes on a very different meaning, and a bad translation could be deadly: Atalaq also means "shoot," and the phrase atalaq al-nar 'ala roughly translates "open fire." (Add one more word to the phrase and the meaning changes again: Fee atalaq al-nar means "to set on fire.") According to Lanahan, Compadre's robust translation engine is able to discern such subtle idiosyncrasies. "Our metric for success is that the program will understand the context, and retain the original meaning of the phrase," he says.

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The secret behind Compadre's fluency is a complex translation engine that uses a hybrid process of both coded rules (say-therefore: chien=dog) and a high degree of human input. To teach the program the idiosyncratic subtleties and context-based quirks of a particular language, SpeechGear recruited foreign language experts to tutor the program—a time consuming process, but one that ultimately results in an robust translation tool. With its Compadre its language classes complete, the program is able to accurately parse out the true meaning and intent behind a confusing (to a program) Arabic phrase—not to mention the over 200 other languages the program can interpret.

SpeechGear hopes the military will find a use for Compadre, loaded onto their Endurance PC, which uses two hot-swappable batteries and can incorporate an integrated camera, Bluetooth, as well as other mission-critical technologies such as GPS. Currently there are 24 Endurance units deployed throughout the Middle East for field-testing, and, according to available accounts, the system is a success. In a memo discussing his experience with an early version of the product, Lt. Col. Patrick J. Carroll, a Marine linguist with the Second Marine Expeditionary Force, called the program "the crown jewel of machine translation."

But war zones are far from the only areas where SpeechGear sees a market for Compadre. "We imagine they'll be in all sorts of places where foreign speakers interact," said Lanahan. "They could be installed everywhere from grocery stores to the concierge desk at international hotels." And for the average business traveler and tourist, SpeechGear offers a simplified version of Compadre called Interpreter that runs on the Palm OS or a Pocket PC. Although the program has no speech functions, it does offer a highly flexible common phrase translation tool. And it's relatively inexpensive ($70, compared to the full, Arabic-speech-ready program, which retails for around $10,000) with a free, 10-day trial download.

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Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, however, have a desperate need for an efficient translator, whether it's a human or a machine. As one Army squad leader describes his interactions with potentially hostile locals while guarding an ammunition supply point in Northern Iraq, conveying simple—yet critical—information can prove extremely difficult. "It was almost silly," he tells me. "Beyond basic phrases, we had to rely on gestures: I'd point to my eyes and then to my body and then back at this guy to tell him I didn't want to see him come any closer. Then we'd fire a off a round into the dirt so he'd understand what would happen if he didn't comply." To paraphrase the prison warden from Cool Hand Luke, what we have there is a failure to communicate.

The speech interpretation interface saves a written record of the spoken conversation.

Stripped down for a PDA, Interpreter is still a powerful translation tool.

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